Saturday, 23 January 2016

The Guardian resurrects the Boozy Britain moral panic

The Guardian has had one of its spasms today with a series of articles attempting to revive the Boozy Britain panic. The newspaper is indistinguishable from the Daily Mail on such occasions. Its front page story reads like a press release from the Alcohol Health Alliance. That's because it is.

Earlier this week the Australian neo-temperance lobby got some headlines when it pointed out that a relatively small number of drinkers account for a large proportion of alcohol sales. This is hardly surprising. It is the same in most industries and is known as the Pareto Principle.

Seeing the news coverage in Australia, British wowsers made their own back-of-the-envelope calculation and alerted the Guardian's Sarah Boseleywho lapped it up.

Exclusive: Firms claim to support responsible
drinking, yet data shows those who consume at risky or harmful levels
account for 60% of sales in England

Note the implicit accusation of dishonesty here, as if the statistic somehow proves that the 'firms' do not support responsible drinking. It is, of course, entirely up to the individuals how much they choose to drink and they will consume whatever quantity they like regardless of the views of the manufacturer.

The alcohol industry makes most of its money – an estimated £23.7bn
in sales in England alone – from people whose drinking is destroying or
risking their health, say experts who accuse the industry of
irresponsible pricing and marketing.

That £23.7 billion isn't really the industry's money though, is it? About £7 billion is tax, for a start. Only a fraction of it is profit.

While the industry points to the fact that most people in the country
are moderate drinkers, 60% of alcohol sales are either to those who are
risking their health, or those – labelled harmful drinkers – who are
doing themselves potentially lethal damage, figures seen by the Guardian
show.

This claim is based on the government's scientifically insupportable drinking guidelines which classify moderate drinkers as hazardous drinkers. 19 per cent of Britons supposedly fall under that category. The Guardian doesn't bother to mention that this percentage has been falling for years. (It will soon rise now that guidelines have been lowered - that was the whole point.) In any case, it should not be surprising that people who drink quite a bit consume a larger proportion of the nation's alcohol than people who don't drink very much.

Separate work in progress from Sheffield University helps to establish
the value of this custom to the industry. In 2013, the data shows, 38.2%
of the value of alcohol sales in England came from risky drinkers and
24.5% from harmful drinkers. Industry sales in the UK were £45.5bn in
2013.

The Sheffield University researchers are not named but I'll take a wild stab in the dark and guess that they are the same small team of academics who came up with the hopeless minimum pricing model and the laughable new drinking guidelines. If so, how nice of them to share unpublished research with a hardcore anti-alcohol lobby group for propaganda purposes, just as they shared unpublished research with Panorama for propaganda purposes (research that was so utterly inept that the programme had to be re-edited to remove it.) It's almost as if those guys are activists rather than impartial academics, isn't it?

It's not too difficult to estimate how much alcohol 'hazardous drinkers' consume so even the Sheffield mob have a good chance of not totally ballsing up the figures. All the numbers in the Guardian article are in the same ballpark as one would expect if the drinks industry was like any other industry. About 25 per cent of drinkers are buying about 70 per cent of the drinks. The question is 'So what?'

Katherine Brown, director of the Institute of Alcohol
Studies, said: “It comes as no surprise to learn the drinks industry
relies on excessive consumption of alcohol to boost its profits. Why
else would alcohol producers spend millions of pounds on advertising
each year encouraging people to drink more...

Aside from the fact that it is illegal for alcohol advertisements to 'encourage people to drink more', the 'why else would they do it?' argument against advertising is just dumb, as I explained on the IEA blog recently...

‘If advertising doesn’t work, why do companies spend so much money on
it?’ This is the zinger that is supposed to end all argument about
whether marketing increases the consumption of certain products. The
products under discussion are usually things that one side of the
argument would prefer people did not buy and, to that end, think should
not be advertised.

One can reply by saying that advertising is not coercive. One can
point out that no amount of advertising can sell a bad product. One can
argue that advertising is primarily aimed at making users of a product
switch to a different brand. You can explain any of this, but the retort
will always be the same. “Ah, but if advertising didn’t work, they
wouldn’t do it!”

For example, an organisation called Alcohol Action Ireland currently
wishes to ban alcohol sponsorship in sports. ‘Alcohol sponsorship of
sports works in terms of increasing sales and, as a result, alcohol
consumption,’ it asserts. ‘If it didn’t the alcohol industry simply
would not spend so much money on it.’ They assume that the drinks
industry hopes and expects advertising to increase consumption.

However, advertisers are not spending their money as an industry, but
as rival firms trying to sell their own brands. Their battle for market
share may or may not coincide with a growing market for alcohol as a
whole, but an individual company does not need a growing market in order
to become more profitable. There are plenty of heavily advertised
products in markets that are static or declining. Imagine ‘Toilet Paper
Action’ Ireland declaring that ‘Toilet paper advertising works in terms
of increasing sales and, as a result, toilet paper consumption. If it
didn’t Andrex simply wouldn’t spend so much money on it.’ Such a
statement would be patently absurd.

It is futile trying to explain this to the morons of 'public health'. They fundamentally do not understand how business works. Speaking of morons, look who else the Guardian approached for a comment...

Gerard Hastings, professor of social marketing at Stirling
University, said the data “throws into relief the conflict of interest
between industry and public health. Industry is driven by the need to
sell as much as it possibly can. Ultimately the marketing department
rules the waves.”

No, Gerard. Industry is driven by the need to make as much profit as it possibly can. It can do so when sales are in decline, as has been the case in the alcohol industry for the last decade. It's not about volume, it's about margins. Someone should have explained this to Sarah Boseley before she wrote a front page story that confuses revenue with profit.

Brown said evidence from Canada showed that a 10% increase in alcohol prices led to a 32% reduction in alcohol-related deaths.

Incredibly, this is oneof seven Booze Britain articles in the Guardian today. One of them claims that 'up to 35 per cent of A & E visits in the north-east are alcohol-related'. This is based on an unpublished report from another neo-temperance group, the wholly state-funded Balance North East. The 35 per cent figure is at odds with a recent, published study that found the figure in Newcastle to be 12 to 15 per cent. As a rule of thumb, anyone who prefixes a statistic with the words 'up to' is trying it on.

Most of the articles claim that there are more than one million alcohol-related hospital admissions and assert that this has doubled in ten years. This is based on a ridiculously broad definition of 'alcohol-related' which includes primary and secondary diagnoses. As I explained in Alcohol and the Public Purse, secondary diagnoses are more likely to be recorded than in the past and the broad measure gives many false positives...

Under what the ONS calls the ‘broad measure’, there are admissions which involve people who have a partly or wholly alcohol-attributable condition as a secondary diagnosis but who were attending hospital for a condition that was not alcohol-related.
For example, if someone who happened to have hypertension went to hospital for treatment of a virus, this would be counted as an alcohol-related admission (or, to be precise, a fraction of an alcohol-related admission) because hypertension is sometimes caused by alcohol use.

Moreover, clinicians are more likely to record a secondary diagnosis than they were in the past, leading to ‘artificial inflation over time due to changes unrelated to the actual occurrence of disease’ and implausibly large increases in putative costs. For example, if taken at face value, the most recent NHS cost estimate showed a 67 per cent rise in the cost of alcohol-related hospital admissions in the space of just three years... These runaway costs, which coincided with a steep decline in alcohol consumption, are an almost inevitable result of including admissions for which alcohol was not the primary diagnosis. It reflects little more than the ageing population, coding drift, and the increased use of hospitals (the number of finished consultant episodes’ in English hospitals for all causes rose from 12 million to 18 million between 2001 and 2013).

The broad measure is so unreliable that the Department of Health no longer uses it. 'Public health' lobbyists still use it because it gives them a bigger number and, as ever, they don't care about the truth.

About Me

Writer and researcher at the Institute of Economic Affairs. Blogging in a personal capacity.
Author of Selfishness, Greed and Capitalism (2015), The Art of Suppression (2011), The Spirit Level Delusion (2010) and Velvet Glove, Iron Fist (2009).

"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience."